Thursday, January 23, 2014

I was going to post the first part of my analysis of "The King and the Slave Girl" about a week ago. Then I found out that I needed to get three chapters of my dissertation completed and handed into my thesis committee in the next few days and so I haven't been able to work on that post yet. But as soon as I finish up these three chapters I will begin publishing my posts again on a more regular bi-weekly basis. Thanks for reading and bearing with me as I finish up the last few months of my studies! And keep reading the Masnavi! The more you read the more it will speak with you. See you in a few days (or a week?)!

Sunday, January 5, 2014

Last week we discussed what the Masnavi’spoetic
introduction, “The Song of the Reed”, has to say about us, its readers. I made four specific claims:

1) The reed and the Masnavi have important things to
share with us, its readers, about love.

2) In order to understand the Masnavi, however, we
must be lovers who are entirely focused on the beloved.

3) We are not currently such lovers but can be trained to
become so through reading about love in the Masnavi.

4) Our transformation into such lovers, which is the same as
gaining the ability to understand the Masnavi, is the real meaning and
purpose of the Masnavi.

This week I will begin my analysis of the initial step in this
transformation that occurs as a result of reading the Masnavi’s first
story, “The King and the Slave Girl”. I will first discuss the manners in which
this story has traditionally been interpreted and then explain my own general approach
to the story.

Overall, “The King and the Slave Girl” is a rather
strange story to begin the Masnavi with. Why would a book that well-known
scholars have called “humankind's most important mystical epic” begin with a bizarre
tale that ends with a seemingly unjust murder for the affections of a girl? Why
open with a narrative that describes how a king kills an innocent goldsmith in
order to free a slave girl that the king may or may not be in love with from
her own love towards that goldsmith? Why begin with such a controversial narrative
that would immediately raise the protest of the Masnavi’s readers?

In order to provide a reading of “The King and the Slave
Girl” that solves the dilemma of the goldsmith's murder, as well as other
strange aspects of the story, many readers have interpreted it allegorically. Such
interpretations view each character and narrative element in the tale as representative
of various mystical elements of the spiritual path, the interactions of which signify
the unfolding of a psychological and/or mystical process that leads the human
soul to a higher level of awareness. Nicholson, for example, interprets the
king as the spirit or reasonable soul and the slave girl as the sensible or
animal soul that has passion for worldly pleasure (represented by the
goldsmith). The divine physician symbolizes the physical manifestation of the
Universal Intellect in the form of the perfect saint and director of souls who
heals the animal soul (the slave girl) of its love for the world's pleasures
(the goldsmith) so that it returns to the spiritual king and becomes united
with its real love. (For those readers who are interested, a good summary of
various such allegorical interpretations can be found on pages 74-77 of Rumi’s
Mystical Design by Seyed Ghahreman Safavi and Simon Weightman)

The advantage of such allegorical
interpretations is that they provide a simple and tidy explanation for many of
the difficult issues that are found in the tale of “The King and the Slave
Girl”. For example, at the point where the king meets the divine physician, the
reader may be surprised by the king's sudden exclamation that the divine
physician is his beloved and not the slave girl. Or, as the narrator predicts
at the end of the story, the reader might still find the murder of the
goldsmith to be rather unsettling. If the story is an allegory, however, such
issues settle themselves as we are no longer dealing with real characters and
their interactions, but with signs pointing to a mystical process. The falling
in love of the king with the divine physician should not be surprising for the
reader, therefore, because the king is, for example, actually the human soul
realizing its real love for its higher self (or God). And this shouldn't
disturb the reader because it is this very realization that the story is trying
to point to through its allegory.

The goldsmith's murder as well seems to be
neatly solved through this kind of interpretation. If, for example, the
goldsmith represents the world and its attractions, which keep the ego (the slave
girl) from realizing its true love for the soul (the king), then it is only
natural that the world and its attractions must in some manner be “killed” in
order to free the ego from its grip. This killing, then, is not really murder,
but represents some sort of spiritual gnosis or even the effects of love that
set the human ego free.

There are, however, several problems with such a
manner of interpretation:

First, the allegorical details of the story are
very unstable. For example, at the beginning of the story the king appears to
represent the human soul or the sufi aspirant but by the end he seems to
represent God or the Perfect Man. Which
is it?

Second, due to the fact that there is no direct
evidence in the text to support one allegorical reading over another, every reader
is able to come up with their own allegorical interpretation. But how can we
tell which of these interpretations is the correct one?

Third, such allegorical readings do not
actually solve such strange aspects of the story as the king's sudden love for
the divine physician or the unsettling murder of the goldsmith. Instead they
turn these aspects of the story into a sign for something else such as
“asceticism” that can no longer threaten the reader's interpretative stance
toward the tale, and worse yet, they use concepts found outside the Masnavi to
make these assertions.

Fourth, allegorical readings are not able to
answer the question as to why Rumi chose this particular tale, a love story,
for his allegory rather than another, or why he chose to use these particular
elements rather than others. After all, if Rumi's intention was to lay out an
introductory allegory pointing to “the human condition” or aspects of “the
spiritual path” why would he choose such a threatening one, with unsettling
elements that cause many of his readers to so lose focus on the story's meaning
that the narrator feels the need to spend the entire last section of the story
defending the characters’ actions? This question is especially important
considering the fact that there are several other allegorical stories in the Masnavi
that could have been used to represent “the human condition” or the “Sufi path”.
For example, “The Story of the Generous Caliph” of Book One, or “The Story of
the Prince to Whom the True Kingdom Displayed Itself” of Book Four, could both
be wonderful allegorical tales of the human state or the Sufi path but do not
contain any of the unsettling elements of “The King and the Slave Girl”.
Additionally, aspects of the tale could have been changed to make it less
disturbing, such as making the goldsmith out to be a morally repulsive
individual deserving of death – in the same manner that the old witch in “The
Story of the Prince to Whom the True Kingdom Displayed Itself” was deserving of
death for her actions – or having the goldsmith die as the consequence of some
bad action of his own. Allegorical readings, however, are not equipped to
explain why Rumi chose to include disturbing elements in his tale.

Fifth, if Rumi had intended the story to be
read allegorically, one would expect the narrator to offer or point to some
sort of allegorical explanation for the story as he does in other Masnavi narratives.
This is especially true since the narrator spends an entire section defending the
story against those readers who apparently did not find it very satisfying. Wouldn’t
the easiest defense have been that the story is not supposed to be taken
literally in the first place? Instead of using such a justification, however, what
is interesting about the narrator’s discussion is that he seems to take the
story literally himself. Instead of replying that the death of the goldsmith is
not wrong because he only represents the attractions of the world, the narrator
discusses the death as the killing of an actual human character without
recourse to allegory. The fact that the narrator does not provide an allegory for
the story, therefore, suggests that the narrator didn't want the main
interpretation of the story to be an allegorical one.

Rather than avoiding the disturbing and
threatening elements of the tale by allegorizing them away, a more satisfying
reading of the story should be able to turn these threats into essential elements
of the interpretation. It should also be able to answer the question as to why
this particular narrative, and these particular narrative elements, and not
other seemingly less threatening ones, are used. Lastly, it should also use
elements and concepts from within the story in order to make its
interpretation, rather than relying on external concepts that find no direct
support within the Masnavi itself.

In order to supply such a reading, therefore, in my analysis of this story I will investigate the specific function that this narrative plays in the Masnavi as a whole. In other words I will seek to discover why Rumi hasplaced this particular story at the opening of the Masnavi. By the end I hope to demonstrate that “The Story of the King and the Slave Girl” functions as a litmus test that Rumi performs on his readers. In this litmus test Rumi uses a complex series of narrative techniques in order demonstrate the inadequacy of the reader’s interpretive strategies and to offer love as an alternative interpretative strategy that the reader must embrace in order to properly understand the story and, consequently, the Masnavi as a whole. Meaning is created in the narrative not through the reader’s mental acceptance of the Masnavi’sconcept of “love” per se, but through his or her performance of that “love” by accepting the proper interpretation that the narrator offers the reader in order to explain the events of the narrative. This performance of love represents the initial polishing of the reader’s interpretive mirror on his or her path to becoming an ideal reader and lover.

Homework:

I recommend reading the story again this week and thinking about the following questions:

Is there evidence for an allegorical reading of this story? If so
where? If not, why are allegorical readings so popular?

What specific parts of this story do you find surprising or
disturbing? Why?

How does the narrator defend this story? Why do you think he chooses such a defense?

Again please feel free to leave any thoughts or comments you have on this post, or the story in general, below.

Next week I will
begin my analysis of the text of “The King and the Slave Girl” in order to highlight
the strategies that Rumi uses in order to perform this “litmus test” on his
readers.